Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, announced on Monday that the state of Georgia has opened 250 investigations into “credible claims of illegal voting and violation of state election law.”
“As we move forward in the process, we will, as we always have been, we will continue to investigate credible claims of illegal voting and violation of state election law,” Raffensperger said. “There are currently over 250 open cases from 2020 and we have 23 investigators to follow up on that. Some of these include, a charge Gwinnett County that absentee ballots outnumber absentee envelopes. This is the kind of specific charge that our office can investigate and ascertain the truth.”
“We have multiple investigations underway surrounding absentee ballots in Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, and many others. We continue our investigations into potential dead, double voters, and non-resident voters,” he continued. “As we move to the December 1st election, which is tomorrow, and the January 5th federal runoffs, we have to remain vigilant.”
“That is why I’m announcing an investigation into third party groups working to register people in other states to vote here in Georgia,” he added. “We have opened an investigation into a group called America Votes who is sending absentee ballot applications to people at addresses where they have not lived since 1994; Vote Forward, who attempted to register a dead Alabama voter, a woman, to vote here in Georgia; The New Georgia Project, who sent voter registration applications to New York City, at Operation New Voter Registration Georgia, who is telling college students in Georgia that they can change their residency to Georgia and then change it back after the election.”
During the press conference, Raffensperger was careful to qualify his statements, noting that “dishonest actors” were pumping “massive amounts of misinformation” into the media ecosystem, Daily Wire reported. He said “exploiting the emotions of many Trump supporters with fantastic claims, half truths, misinformation, and frankly, they are misleading the president as well.”
Raffensperger concluded the press conference by repeatedly reminding people that committing election fraud in Georgia, which includes voting in the state when a person is not a resident of the state, is a felony.
The U.S. Senate runoff races in January will determine which political party controls the Senate just ahead of the incoming Biden administration.
“In Georgia, where state law dictates a runoff if no candidate reaches 50% of the vote, GOP Sen. David Perdue narrowly missed avoiding a runoff, winning 49.75% of the vote. Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff trails by roughly 87,000 votes,” Fox News reported. “In the other race, appointed Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler captured nearly 26% of the vote in a whopping 20-candidate special election to fill the final two years of the term of former GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson. The Democratic candidate in the runoff, Rev. Raphael Warnock, won nearly 33% of the vote in the first round.”
Meanwhile, The Trump campaign is filing a lawsuit to the Wisconsin Supreme Court Tuesday — alleging abuse around the process of absentee voting in the state, which they say affected approximately 220,000 ballots, Fox News reported.
The lawsuit is expected to be filed Tuesday morning and comes after Wisconsin completed its partial recount — which maintained that Joe Biden won the presidential race in the state — and after Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers formally certified Biden’s victory Monday night.
The Trump campaign’s Wisconsin legal team, led by former Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge Jim Troupis, told Fox News that while the recount in the state did not flip in President Trump’s favor, it gave the campaign the “unique ability” to examine ballots.
“Exposing exactly how the election processes were abused in Wisconsin holds enormous value for this election beyond a victory for President Trump, but the fact is, our state’s electoral votes likely won’t change the overall outcome,” Troupis told Fox News. “Regardless, we’re demonstrating that the results of this election unequivocally ought to be questioned.”
The legal team also said the suit highlights “a lack of transparency and credibility on part of local election officials and their willful disregard of the law on multiple occasions” and added that the state’s laws and processes gave it the “unique ability” to “illustrate this abuse with precision.”
The campaign claims officials on the Wisconsin Election Commission and the City Clerks of Milwaukee and Madison “willfully disregarded the current statute and made conscious efforts to circumvent Wisconsin election law,” resulting in tens of thousands of votes cast “well outside of the bounds of Wisconsin law.”
It also asserts the law was violated “on several occasions” through what it described as altered-certification absentee ballot envelopes, a lack of required absentee ballot applications, unlawful claims of indefinite confinement and voting events called “Democracy in the Park.”
Wisconsin law requires that written absentee ballot request forms must be submitted ahead of the voter casting their absentee ballot, but the Trump campaign claimed that election officials, instead, “accepted ballots without the required absentee applications on file.”
“The Wisconsin State Legislature has explicitly required an application,” a Trump campaign official told Fox News, saying it is “mandatory and any ballots without an application or with an incomplete application are not to be counted.”
The campaign said ballots cast without the initial absentee ballot applications on file “must be called into question.”
